Easy Home Remedies to Prevent Negligent Homicide

Why are doctors so incompetent?

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Look I don't want you to think I'm here just to sully the good name of medical professionals — in fact, I've never been at a restaurant and had the whole room call me out of my day off to Heimlich manoeuver a peanut off of someone's windpipe, so if anyone deserves unsupervised societal prestige, it's them doctors and doctresses.

But we can't just sit here and deny the fact that there is a remarkably stupid breed of physicians out there putting the "practice" into "medical malpractice," not by honest mistake but by riding the absolute cutting edge of human idiocy.

Luckily I only had to survive small, trivial negligence myself — had a mishandled kidney stone and one of my toenails is three-quarters the standard width; don't ask — but I've read stories about towels being forgotten inside stomachs, wrong medications turning patients into indoor plants, and other kinds of half-cocked duncery that leave me wondering whether I should prepare my Darwin Award's acceptance speech next time I check into a hospital.

I learned of a British neurologist that misdiagnosed 618 children with epilepsy. Six hundred and eighteen. That guy's license should've been destroyed atop Mount Doom after the 3rd mistake, but he kept going, the clueless dolt, prescribing medication kids didn't need and probably telling them to eat the lollipop from the stick.

Hell, I know a woman who started oozing spinal fluid off her back after 4 botched surgeries. She lived to tell the tale, but I imagine that being left leaking like the undercarriage of a Pimp My Ride car before Xzibit puts some work into it is no bucket-list experience.

Don't let all this anecdotic rhetoric worry you though.

Like you, I too reject the thought that all doctors are a bunch of fat-headed numbskulls who got their degrees using Skillshare coupons and playing Operation, but here's the thing. Let's say you are a barista; you can go and fuck up a Starbucks order to the utter pinnacle of coffee-making botchery — put whipped cream on ice water and drop your watch inside it or something — and you can't still make headlines for OD'ing Michael Jackson.

And that's why we all have cursed medical stories.

Because if something goes wrong at the hospital, it never is a "storm off and leave a one-star review" kind of situation. You won't get hair in your soup; you'll get the wrong blood type transfused by mistake and be told to brace for calamity as your body starts glitching harder than an HP printer trying to make sense of an off-brand ink cartridge.

You know, the kind of experience that's hard to Prozac off your mind's eye.

No wonder why some people go alternative, gearing up on Power Balance bracelets and hoping psychoactive mushrooms teach their bodies how to photosynthesize. I guess your willingness to try out Gwyneth Paltrow's "Psychic Vampire Repellent Protection Mist" goes up as you survive more episodes of medical negligence. I mean, we like to think of hospitals as life-saving environments but at no other place on Earth you can go in with a mild ear infection and have statistical malpractice leaving you looking like Stephen Hawking's stunt double.

What I’m saying is, a little scepticism in medicine is healthy.

I’m not telling you to become an ambassador for colonic irrigation and zodiac diets, but doctors are, after all, not unerring demigods with omniscient critical thinking skills. Yours may look smart and put together, but deep down he's just a postgraduate with a vestigial Adderall addiction who's long forgotten what a good night's sleep is supposed to feel like.

A mess in a stethoscope telling you to bend over, that's all.

Well, that is, if you're lucky not to be checked out by a wrinkly old fogey who's old enough to remember back when the entire health sector was a bunch of tea herbs and a voodoo doll; a guy so ancient the last medicine textbook he read was probably in cuneiform — archaeologists had to dig it out from the same sarcophagus he sleeps in, the fucking dinosaur.

For that reason I have a simple rule: if a physician looks like the grandpa from Up in a surgical gown, I'm not trusting him with cutting my nails.

Who do you think were the galaxy brains that came up with lobotomies and radioactive water? Nowadays you'd have to be declared dead from the neck up to consider "Heroin Cough Syrup for Kids" a good idea, but a mere century ago, that was the shit 9 out of 10 doctors were recommending.

But oh well. First-world problems.

We regular mortals just need to be reminded of the fact that some people can ace an MCAT test, get a PhD and still have the empathy instincts of a boa constrictor. That some people can pledge to the Hippocratic Oath and then prescribe you crystal meth because they only care about the paycheck (and that retirement yacht ain't gonna fund itself without Big Pharma bribes anyway).

But as long as we keep ourselves moderately up-to-date on health and wellness research and resist the urge to google our symptoms, I think we'll be fine.

And in case of emergency, just remember the old adage: an apple a day keeps the doctor away if you have good aim and throw it hard enough.